How to compress vocals - [Logic Pro X]

[Music] okay funny story so when I was a kid I took a few piano lessons and I learned how to read music but I was always frustrated with reading music because I felt like I could learn songs more quickly and easily just by ear I'd always like look up my favorite songs listen to them and figure them out well I thought it was pretty cool in fourth grade apparently because I decided to figure out how to play the real Slim Shady and so I figured it out and I was like super pumped I was excited and I decided to play the real Slim Shady by Eminem on the piano on my school talent show it was the most awkward thing I felt like nobody knew the song I was playing it wasn't like some beautiful piece of music or anything like that I mean there are kids playing the violin there were people singing and there are people who just you know we're like classically trained and Here I am with like my two lessons of piano and just like figuring out music and that was so embarrassing anyways today we are not talking about my fourth grade talent show or my piano skills or lack thereof but today we are talking about compression compression is super important and when I started producing I had no idea how to use it so I'm gonna break it down for you guys [Music] when I first started producing one of the things I wish I would have known how to do or understand is compression so today I'm just gonna give you a quick 101 session on how a compressor works and when I use it specifically for vocals so that you get an idea of how compression can take your vocal production to the next line and why it's important if you like these videos don't forget to that thumbs up make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss future videos and if you ever have any questions or want to see more content check me out on Instagram okay so I've got my vocals here I'm gonna show you just a little snippet of what it sounds like with the whole song [Music] so there's my vocal chain and by the way if you missed my last video I announced that I have a stock lead vocal preset available for download I'm gonna put a link in the description basically you're getting the you know as close as you can get with these third-party plugins mm-hmm but with stock sounds and that's what I'm actually going to be showing you in this video as I show you how compression works baby really follow you okay so let's jump right into it so if you notice here I have my whole vocal chain set up but I'm gonna leave it to my first compressor to show you what I've got going on here so basically the only adjustments that I've done to this this audio recording so far is some gain staging for the overall mix some EQ simple and then this is the first compressor we're adding to your vocals now I say first because something that's the best practice is to have multiple compressors and the reason behind it is because the more compressors you have the less work each compressor has to do to compress your vocals in this case I'm going to show you how I add my first compressor to my vocals and break down the settings so that you understand how to do this down your vocal chain and for other situations so the first thing you're gonna notice here is this is a stock plug-in inside of logic if you go into dynamics compressor this is what populates now there's a ton of knobs here and it seems super overwhelming but it's actually pretty straightforward there are only one two three four five settings that you really need to worry about here now you'll notice that there are different compressors here available but platinum digital if you actually go to the Apple website and go into the manual for logic it actually shows you what kinds of things these compressors work or are designed for platinum digital works really well for vocals so I like using that so these are the five knobs that you need to understand in order to compress vocals one we have is threshold then we have ratio make up gain attack and release that's it these are the only knobs that you're going to be touching in here and it's gonna make a huge difference so the first thing I want to talk about is what is compression the simplest way that I can put it is basically you're trying to reduce the distance between your loudest part of your recording and your lowest in volume part of recording and make that distance a lot shorter you may be asking why would you want to do that the reason you want to do that is because in a recording you want to be able to hear everything right you want to be able to hear the lowest in volume just as clear as the highest in volume so when you actually bridge that gap and make that a gap a little bit shorter so basically the distance between your loudest and your lowest part of your recording shorter then it makes for a more consistent sounding audio clip and that way it's just consistently within that same range of volume so that you can hear everything right okay so let's talk about threshold what you're telling the compressor with the threshold is basically whatever you set it to be in this case I've got it to negative forty six point five I'm saying anything that is above negative forty six point five dB I want you to compress right and how much I want you to compress is determine by this these other notes so we'll jump into that in a second so what you'll want to be watching here is this meter right here the needle in the meter a good rule of thumb is that you want as you're playing the audio clip you want it to be around negative three DB so you don't want it to go all the way up here you don't want the needle to swing all the way up here because that's very very aggressive compression and the reason you don't want to do that is because when you are too aggressive with your compressor it kind of dehumanizes and takes some of the life out of the recording especially with vocals because it's just not natural it's not natural for me to have a consistent volume for every single word I say I sound more like a robot right so it's more natural to have a little bit of wiggle room between my loudest word and my lowest word and that's why compression is so important watch the needle here as I play the audio by itself so you notice the needle is moving basically that's telling you what what's happening right so as soon as it hits a threshold it's compressing here and like I said a good rule of thumb with vocals is that you don't want to compress too much after negative 3 dB it's okay if some of your Peaks go there a little bit past it but for the most part you want it to be hovering around this area and not moving all the way out here so if I move the threshold all the way as far as it goes it's just going a little bit too far so I'm gonna set it here like negative 46 so now that you've set your threshold now you have to tell the compressor okay what do you want it to do to the vocals that are past that threshold so ratio so basically what the ratio is is what you're saying is if my ratio is at 3 to 1 it means that for every 1 DB my audio recording is above the threshold so every 1 DB that's above the threshold I want the compressor to compress 3 DB below that DB amount so the higher your ratio the more aggressive your compressor is the lower your ratio the less aggressive it is so I have this one set to 3 to 1 but a good safe zone is 2 to 1 so for every 1 DB that it's above the threshold you're asking the compressor to compress 2d beats baby will have been waiting for you what are you doing yeah mmm baby really have been waiting for you that's it that's how simple the ratio is now the next thing I want to talk about is attack and release so before I go further I just want to thank today's sponsor this video is sponsored by Skillshare Skillshare is an online community with thousands of classes to choose from filmmaking to music production to art all sorts of things if you want to learn something chances are there is a course about it on Skillshare it's super affordable at less than $10 a month so I am a huge fan of filmmaking I love making movies and you know the power of telling stories through a video I've been taking this course by Dan mace that talks about how to properly tell a story through a video and it's just great so if you want to learn something new check out Skillshare there's gonna be a link in the description the first thousand people to click on the link will get two months of premium membership for free alright let's dive back into compression you'll notice as soon as I press play it takes a minute for the needle to actually move and that's because my attack is set at 4.5 milliseconds now what the attack means attack and release is basically when you're telling the compressor to turn on from when your vocal starts when you're telling the compressor to turn on and what how long do you want the compressor to hold its effects until it releases so let me explain I've set the attack to be 4.5 milliseconds that's a quick attack if you'll notice that's all the way on this side where the slowest attack is about 200 milliseconds on this compressor so when I press play see how it takes a little bit before it starts actually compressing your attacking your release determine how smooth the software actually compresses the vocal and how more seamless it is so typically with vocals you want it to attack right away especially because when you start a phrase is when you have the most volume so you want the compressor to take into effect very quickly so that you don't have like these really high peaks so I've set it to 4.5 milliseconds on this one and then the release you we want the compressor to actually hold before it actually goes back down so you'll notice it takes it's a little bit slower to come back down on the meter so because we have a quick attack and a slower release you're going to notice that the needle moves up more quickly than it moves down watch again [Music] takes longer before it goes back to zero that's our release so these this attack and release setting I feel works really well especially for R&B but you can tweak these based off of your project so that's threshold ratio attack and release those are the most important settings the last thing that you want to know here is make up gain and basically because you are reducing volume in your overall track by compressing now that you've compressed it you want to make up for that volume loss right you want to make your audio recording louder and how do we do that with make up gain so it's making up the lost gain gain is your volume so in this case I've added 3.5 DB to my overall compressed recording so I'm gonna mess with this knob here so you can kind of get a feel for what is happening mm-hmm baby really have been awaiting it follow you you might be wondering why did I only add a 3.5 dB well like I mentioned at the beginning this is only my first compressor on my vocal chain if you notice on this vocal chain I have a multiband compressor and I have another compressor and then we have a couple of DSS which are essentially compressors for a specific frequency so there's a lot of compression that happens with vocals and the very first one is just to kind of tidy it up you want it to get rid of those very high peaks and make sure that everything is kind of consistent and then as you add more compressors like I said the more compressors you have the less harder they're working in order to make your vocals sound great so now that I have my first compressor set up and ready to go when I go and add my next compressors like let me go halfway through my chain here mm you're not working nearly as hard to get it to sound crisp and clear now if I add all of my compressors and my bus effects so here's my vocal chain with third party plugins [Music] sounds just as good so again if you want to get this vocal preset the link is in the description check it out let me know how you guys feel about it I know it's gonna take your productions to the next level but you'll be able to tweak all the settings in there that's fully customizable you'll be able to tweak the settings to your liking and your style music so there you have it guys that is compression in a nutshell hopefully this demystifies it a little bit for you I know as soon as you open a compressor it seems super complicated with so many knobs and the graph and the meter and just trying to understand what it all means can be overwhelming but hopefully this video helped you if it did don't forget to hit that thumbs up make sure you're subscribed if you want to see more videos like this and as always if you ever have any questions or want to see more content check me out on it keep making beats [Music]

Channel: Valentina Bilancieri

Views: 38,944

Keywords: r&b, music producer, female producer, vocals, Logic Pro x, home studio, studio behind the scenes, studio bts, vocals production, beat making, beatmaking, Valentina, bilancieri, Valentina bilancieri, keep making beats, keep makin beats, mixing, mastering, music production, audio production, hip hop, trap, latina, reggaeton, spanglish music

Id: _oJ-TeWbBSE

Length: 15min 13sec (913 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 30 2020